Using Tables

Tables are essential if you want to keep material aligned on web pages, which is always very important in the case of an online questionnaire. A lot of the problems in getting your web pages to look like you intended them to will be taken care of if you set the window properties appropriately. Tables provide even more control.

We'll cover how tables can be used to deal with different response formats in more detail on another page, but here's a sampling of what tables can do for you. In the examples below, the table borders are visible. You can make them invisible when you design your web page by setting the border width of the table to 0.

• Click here for an example of how tables can keep text aligned with open-ended responses
• Click here for an example of how tables can keep text aligned with drop-down boxes.
• Click here for an example of how tables can keep similar response categories aligned in columns
• Click here for an example of how tables can keep embedded images (video) aligned with text and control buttons (you must have RealPlayer installed).

One of the nicer features of Dreamweaver is the ability to manipulate tables easily. You can resize columns and rows, insert columns and rows, merge cells, or split cells just as in a word processing program. You should be able to get exactly the format you're looking for.